“I said I’d never marry anybody from my home town or anybody I met in a bar, and I did both,” the photographer Michael Northrup told me recently. “She pinched my butt, and that was that.” “She” was Pam, a nurse. Northrup began photographing her right away, honing his style with the help of his new muse. 

When you live with a photographer, the line between artist and paparazzo can feel thin. But, as is made clear by “Dream Away,” Northrup’s new book of photos taken over the course of their relationship, Pam liked to pose for him. One early picture shows her lounging nude on a rough wooden bench, arranged against a patterned pillow like Ingres’s Odalisque or Manet’s Olympia, though Northrup often preferred to capture her in more spontaneous moments. The couple married in 1977, in San Francisco, where Northrup was continuing his photography studies. Right before they went to the courthouse, he snapped a picture of Pam sitting on the toilet in their small bathroom, her satin wedding dress bunched up around her knees, a box of kitty litter in the corner. It may not be a traditional portrait of a bride, but it is an honest one.